


Reading Hamlet

by ladygray99



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Vampires, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2770256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygray99/pseuds/ladygray99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had every word of Kit's works locked into her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reading Hamlet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syllogismos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/gifts).



He found Eve slowly flipping through an old copy of _The Complete Works of William Shakespeare_. He would have never told Kit but he did like a few of the plays Shakespeare actually wrote himself. Oh none of them could hold a candle to _Othello_ or _Hamlet_ or _Coriolanus_ but _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ always made him laugh.

Eve didn't acknowledge him as he sat beside her, sinking into her bed in her room of books. He looked over her shoulder. "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? The conscience dose make cowards of us all."

Eve closed her eyes. Her fingers stilled where before they had danced across the words. "He once told me he wished he'd known you while writing this. That you would have been a perfect model for Hamlet."

"I am so sorry," Adam whispered, though in truth he was not. His quiet call to her from the other side of the world that brought her to him certainly saved her from the bad blood that took Christopher. "Do you think the zombies do it on purpose?"

"Do what?"

"Poison their blood. If maybe one of them discovered us and decided that it was better to kill some of their own if it meant wiping us out. Like burning away crops during a blight."

"I think you give them too much credit."

"You're the one who always says I don't give them enough."

Eve began to run her fingers along Kit's words again, her eyes still closed. She could feel where the ink was pressed into the thin pages. She read while keeping her world in darkness. Adam looked over her shoulder following along. After _Hamlet_ it was _Othello_. Then _Caesar_ and _Coriolanus_. It was nearly dawn when she finished the last blood soaked words of _Titus Andronicus_. She closed the book and leaned back against him. She was hungry, he knew that. They both were. They would have to hunt again, to take the risk. But before that they could sleep. Their own sleep of death from which they would eventually awake.

~

"Play me something," Eve asked two weeks after they put Kit to rest. "Play me something old."

Adam found a kwitra huddled between the stacks of books. He tried to remember the old pieces, the ones he had written when still mortal, on a lute made of ash and strung with the guts of the sheep his father raised. They were mostly songs about rain and cold and being hungry half the year. It was warm and dry in in Tangier but they were still hungry.

He lost himself to his fingers on the strings while Eve lost herself in the past. His past and her own.

~

It took three months and too much hunting to find a new good doctor hiding from America where his student loans were. He gladly took the cash. They sipped the first bag carefully, despite clawing hunger, and waited, waited to fall sick or simply get high. 

The next day they drank more and Eve read through all of Kit's works again.

He knew it was Eve's way of mourning. Every word he ever wrote was locked into her mind long ago but that did not matter. She found the funny moments in _Coriolanus_ and could be remind of sitting in cafes with him talking about the morning's news and gossip centuries old.

When the sun rose that morning, before they slept, he ran his fingers across her skin the same way she had read _Hamlet_. She rolled onto her back so he could trace his fingers around her breasts. They had no need to touch like this often, not after so many years. But like knowing every word of _Hamlet_ some days he still needs to read her and she him.

She reached out and ran her fingers over his hair.

When they had first been together, when he had been mortal and she a huntress carved of moonlight he craved to touch her every second and be touched in return. She made him play for her until his fingers ached and bled. She would lick the blood from his fingertips then allow him to touch her with them. That was when blood, most of it, was still clean. 

~

Five months after Kit was gone they found a production of _Hamlet_ translated into French. It wasn't very good with the French killing the rhythm of the English. The actors were all Moroccan and the costumes were meant to look medieval European but Adam thought they looked more like something from _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_. Eve said that Kit would have liked it just for the work that had gone into it.

That night they went to bed while the moon was still high. Adam read Eve with his lips and tongue. She tasted of the blood they had both drank, and the hashish smoke from the club they had lingered in, lured in by a young musician too good to be appreciated. 

When the sun rose Eve rolled him on his back and read his body softly until he drifted into sleep.

~

A year after they lost Kit their young American doctor left Tangier and they moved back to London. They found a corner of the city still built of crumbling brick and not yet renovated by the hip and rich. Adam found a 1959 Airline guitar in the back of a junk shop. It sat in the corner of their rooms for months. Every time he lifted it to write something new or play something old his hands froze on the strings and his mind went blank. 

Eve found an amateur theater company that was fighting its way through all of Kit's official works. She sat in the back row of every performance, excluding matinees. She sent flowers to the entire company after the opening night of _Doctor Faustus_. After the curtain fell on the last night of _The Massacre at Paris_ Adam found himself able to play for Eve for the first time since they left Tangier.

He played her old music again. Old music to heal fresh wounds. 

She pressed her lips to the back of his neck as he played. She slowly recited _Hamlet_. By the time the Prince of Demark had whispered his last words to Horatio Adam's fingers had begun to bleed. Eve slowly licked them clean.


End file.
